ECK: It started with a story about Americans in the
British Empire. In 1812, when the first American foreign missionaries reached
India, the War of 1812 had just begun and eight American men and women now
found themselves in British territory, ordered to return to the United States,
and placed in police custody. They did not leave, but spent the war years
divided into smaller groups, some fleeing the police and trying to find
alternate mission locations and others trying to convince the local governments
in India that they were not an American threat, but Christian allies in the
task of converting India to Christianity and “civilization.” I came across that
story when I was working on a seminar paper in graduate school and was
fascinated by the boldness of the missionaries who asserted their right to be
in India and played with the questions of their identity as Americans and as
Christians. For some of their British missionary allies, the Americans were
maddening in their lack of a plan and unwillingness to follow the rules of the East
India Company in determining where they would go and what they would do. These early American missionaries felt that
they were following Providence and fulfilling their duty to take part in the
conversion of the world, even as the power of their country to help them do
that work was severely limited. I wanted to know much more about them and to
try and figure out what inspired this movement that they were part of and what
it could tell us about national identity in the early United States. I wanted
to know what they thought they were doing in India in 1812, and how they found
their way to open mission stations around the world by the mid-1840s.

The project grew out of these linked questions of
why the foreign mission movement began when it did and where Americans wanted
to go as missionaries. In 1810, when the American Board of Commissioners for
Foreign Missions was founded, the ambitious global scale of the ABCFM’s plans
are quite surprising, and so I wanted to think about what their decisions about
where to go and what to do when they got there can tell us about how early 19th
century American Protestants thought about the role of their country in the
world. The result is a book that traces American missionaries in Asia, Africa,
North America, the Pacific, and the Middle East in the years before 1848 as a
way of thinking about ideas about race, religion, civilization, and empire in
the early republic.

JF: In 2 sentences, what is the argument of Christian
Imperialism?

ECK: In the
early 19th century, the American foreign mission movement was motivated
by an idea that I have termed Christian imperialism, a claim that America and
other supposedly Christian nations such as Britain should spread Anglo-American
civilization and Protestantism to the peoples of what they called the “heathen
world” as a way of fulfilling their duty to spread the gospel. As they went
about four decades of missionary work, they asserted the centrality of this role
even as the political realities of the world around them ultimately did not
conform to this vision of an American international role.

JF: Why do we need to read Christian
Imperialism?

ECK: Christian
Imperialism takes a broad-scale view of the foreign mission
movement as a way of thinking about the US in the world during the first
decades of the nineteenth century. If you are interested in how Americans have
thought about the role of their country in the world, this is an important part
of that story. Missionaries were some of the earliest Americans to live abroad,
and their writings about their experiences were influential to how Americans at
home understood the peoples of the world. They worked alongside imperial and
colonial projects around the world—including the British East India Company,
the Colonization Society, and the U.S. government—and had an important
perspective on how religion and politics ought to relate to each other. By
looking at missionaries in Asia, Africa, the Pacific Islands, North America,
and the Middle East within the same study, I try to reconstruct the foreign
mission movement as it would have been thought about at the time: a project
with truly global ambitions that emerged at a moment of American political
weakness on a global scale. Thinking
about how those two things fit together can reveal a lot about the place of
America in the world. In light of these difficulties, missionaries had to
prioritize where they went and what they did, and their decisions are revealing
of their thinking about race and “civilization,” and of how that thinking
shaped and was shaped by their religious beliefs and political and economic
structures. The book should be of interest to readers who want to know more
about not only the history of missions, but of the role of the US in the world,
of American imperialism, and of religion and race.

JF: When and why did you decide to become an American historian?

ECK: I was lucky to have some really great history teachers in high school
and college that helped me to see how exciting it could be to become a
historian and try to answer big questions through a careful reading of primary
source documents. In my first semester as an undergraduate at Columbia, Alice
Kessler-Harris introduced us to E.H. Carr and to the idea that how we frame our
questions matters, and where we go looking for our answers matters. It was that
training in women’s history that really inspired me to think about history as a
career. Once I started exploring archives and discovering the fun ways that research
can take you in new directions you weren’t expecting, I was hooked.

JF: What is your next project?

ECK: I’m
starting work now on a project looking at women and transatlantic reform before
1840. In part, this is emerging out of some research on women in the foreign
mission movement that I did for this project but I’m planning on moving beyond
missions to think about the ways that men and women in the US and Great Britain
were talking about women’s participation in reform movements—particularly
religiously motivated movements—in the decades between the Revolution and the
1840 World’s Antislavery Conference in London. It’s very early stages, but I’m
having a lot of fun with it so far.